Twitter is trying to put a stop to Meerkat's viral growth before the app becomes the de-facto live streaming app on the market. Last week, Twitter blocked Meerkat's access to its social graph and then launched Periscope, a competing live video streaming platform.
But like its plucky little namesake looking for food on the African savannah, Meerkat isn't giving up and has responded by improving the app with a number of updates.
Meerkat just released four updates, the most interesting of which is a new recommended followers list. Previously, to find followers you had to use the Leaderboard where the top Meerkats users are ranked by a points system which rewards you for posting and sharing live streams. Now users get a list of recommended people to follow based on their social graph - i.e. followers on other social media sites - and the search functionality has also been improved.
One of the biggest problems to date with Meerkat has been finding streams that are still live. They've made that much easier by allowing you to subscribe to scheduled streams so you won't miss them. You can also tweet your schedule to friends from within the app which should enable video audiences to grow virally.
Comments are also no longer automatically tweeted out to your followers. With this new release, you now have the option to toggle that function on or off.
Lastly, they've made it even easier to kick off a scheduled live stream. When you schedule a stream ahead of time and it's time to go live, just press Stream Now - and you're live.
Meerkat may not be as polished as Periscope, but the app stole the show at SXSW and is already being widely used by celebrities like 'he Tonight Show's Jimmy Fallon, so Twitter may have a job on its hands trying to halt the viral growth.
